Blue Paintings, 2011


Diasec prints 50 cm x 60 cm (edition of 1)

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This group of works by Miguel Santos uses photography as a medium to propose a reflection regarding the possibility of what is visible, as representation, in a direct relation with painting and landscape.  This relation exists in two levels of his work: first, through the titles, which reclaim our visual and semantic vocabulary as a remissive index. Secondly, through a particular attention, from the author, to art history and the transformations that occurred in painting throughout the 20th century following through the indexical nature of painting, the monochromatic and abstraction. However, the reference to painting and the identification as a series only suggests an approach to the works that reveal an internal spatiality that can only be recognized when the spectator understands another essential condition: time.


It is in this context that the exhibition layout, a serialized composition which is apparently repeated in space, might reveal the detail and differences of each individual image that are only visible and apprehended in permanence and presence of the work. Where what is pictorial in each image, sometimes with a deviant accent between transience and the sublime, can activate traces of a narrative shielded by a cinematographic look that re-contextualizes the interior space proposed by each image. It is worth mentioning a revealing detail in the intentionality of the author while constructing the images, as a perceptual and disruptive device, in the sense that the resemblances present in the series find an ambiguous moment and relocates landscape as a referential instrument. A small “incision”, almost like a scratch in the glass surface of the photographic object, opens a range of possibilities to the formulation of evidence about the place as a subjectivity structure where each one of us rescues a need for a reference, being it imaginary or indecipherable.

The proximity to the monochromatic and repetition is proposed as the possibility of the void’s resistance, the lack of a narrative, and a declared attention to difference, as a continuous essay about the act of seeing.


April 2012, João Silvério